ZPF

We pride ourselves on being a technology company and so naturally, our tech is at the heart of everything we do. Our amazing dev team have built everything from the ground up and continue to adapt and innovate. Now, we have official recognition of our hard work and unique tech – our very own patent! We’ve had a patent approved for our ‘Zero Point of Failure’ technology – or ZPF for short. Sounds complicated, right? Well, it can be. The system is very intelligent and complex. However, let me put it in simple terms…

What is ZPF?

The patent covers the “process” of design, building and running ZPF. This technology internally manages our server infrastructure, supporting both ad serving and internal tools. This is to ensure the maximum possible up-time for all of our services and avoiding disaster if a server fails.

How does it work?

ZPF makes the components of Coull’s infrastructure interchangeable across various cloud providers. This means we’re not tied to one specific provider and we can isolate any problems.

For the techies amongst you, here’s some extra detail about what ZPF includes…

Multiple controllers and providers, meaning there are many versions of the same components

High availability of repos

A ticketing system that’s integrated to self-document resources

High availability of config management and orchestration

Using the lowest cost resources, mix and matched on the best providers

Agnostic deployments on any supported provider

Where did the idea for ZPF come from?

Meet Gary, our most experienced DevOps guy. He’s been at Coull for an impressive 13 years. Some years ago, Gary had to survive a series of major outages from Amazon’s cloud service. This had serious knock-on effects and left Gary having to rebuild a lot of the infrastructure from scratch. So, he then had the perfect excuse to put into practice some ideas. This is where our Zero Point of Failure tech was born. By removing the dependency on a single provider and backing up components on many servers, he could prevent this from happening again.

ZPF took about 12 months to create and we first deployed this technology in production in 2012. And now, thanks to our ZPF tech, our infrastructure is much more reliable, ensures maximum up-time for our clients and isolates any problems.